I’ve attended the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival in Davenport, Iowa five times, starting in 2001. This year’s installment was perhaps the best ever—top-notch bands on the card and some other neat happenings. Due to a scheduling conflict, the festival had to be moved this year to the Waterfront Convention Center and Isle of Capri Casino in neighboring Bettendorf. Although the two music venues seemed satisfactory to me in terms of acoustics, accessibility, and physical layout, the setup was not as convenient as the last Bix I attended, in 2014, which was held at the Adler Center in downtown Davenport.
There, both music halls were barely a one-minute walk apart. This year, they were the equivalent of two or three city blocks apart, which for those attendees who aren’t too fleet-footed, meant at least a five-minute hike that required using two elevators or climbing several flights of steps. I did not ask any of the organizers about all the maneuvering that had to go on to secure this location, but my sense of the audience was that they preferred the Davenport venue.
